Leveraging AI

248 | Beyond ChatGPT: Use Claude Projects For High Impact Content. Steal Michael Steltzner’s Proven Blueprint

• Isar Meitis, Michael (Mike) Stelzner • Season 1 • Episode 248

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What if your best-performing marketer didn’t sleep, worked 24/7, and only cost $20/month?

That’s exactly what Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World, has built using Claude Projects from Anthropic — and in this episode, he breaks it all down.

If you’re a business leader, you’re in the content business — whether it’s emails, reports, proposals, or social posts. But creating high-performing content consistently? That’s where most fall short. This conversation will change that.

Michael reveals his full AI-powered system for building persuasive marketing assets using Claude Projects — including the exact prompts, project structure, training methods, and use cases that are already driving massive ROI for his events and brands.

In this session, you’ll discover:

  • How Claude Projects work (and why Michael prefers them over ChatGPT or Gemini)
  • Why business leaders should think of AI as a strategist, not just a tool
  • How to train Claude to become your best-performing marketing writer
  • Real-world examples of email marketing, podcast scripting, and ideation
  • How AI helps you scale personalization for different customer segments
  • What kind of files, instructions, and feedback loops make Claude better over time
  • Creative ways to repurpose Claude for podcast planning, ad scripts, and beyond
  • Why better output beats faster output when it comes to business impact


Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, the host of Social Media Marketing Podcast and AI Explored, and the creator of Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World. He’s a leading voice in content, marketing, and innovation — helping business leaders stay ahead of what’s next.

📍Connect with Michael on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/stelzner/

About Leveraging AI

If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Isar Meitis:

Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Metis, your host, and we have an incredible episode for you today. It is very exciting for me personally, and you are absolutely going to love it because we're going to share something that is going to be helpful for every single one of you, regardless of what you do, because we're going to learn how to create effective content. Now, I know what you're thinking. I don't create content that's only marketing. People do that, and that is not correct because if you're in sales, you write sales emails. If you are in finance, you create reports, et cetera, et cetera. Literally. Content is a fancy word for communication, right? We all need to communicate with people around us. And the goal of this communication could be either to educate people or drive people to a specific kind of action. And again, we all need to do that, whether with our peers, with the people we report to or with the people who report to us, our clients, and so on. Communication is a big part of what we do, regardless of what you are doing. So creating high. Quality content consistently that drives results consistently is something that should be of high value to every single person listening to this podcast. And hence why this is exactly what we're going to learn in this episode. We're going to learn how to create structured, consistent, effective content using Claude Projects. So many of you probably don't know what Claude projects are, and this is what we're going to start in the episode is telling you exactly what that is. So to teach us how to create effective content with cloud projects, we are going to be, uh, joined by the one and only Mike Stelzner. Now, those of you who don't know Mike, now, first of all, if you've been listening to podcasts for a while, you probably heard the name because Mike has been recording, uh, the Social Media Marketing podcast since people was listening to Walkman's. That's how long he's been in the podcasting industry. Uh, but he's also the founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World. social Media Marketing World is the largest social media marketing conference in the world as far as I know, which tells you he knows one or two things about creating effective content if he can bring all these people to California every single year. Now, on a very personal note, Mike's podcast was the very first podcast I ever listened to somewhere back in, I dunno, 2014 ish. And, uh, he has been probably one of the biggest inspirations for me to become a podcaster. So if you are enjoying this podcast, you need to give some credit to Mike because without him I might not have been, uh, in the podcasting universe. So it's on, on a very personal level. It's a great honor for me to have him on the show. But beyond my personal excitement about the whole situation, uh, Mike is also, the. Been always ahead of the curve when it comes to technologies and adopting them so beyond just a. Social media marketing. He was one of the very first people to start sharing real serious information about, blockchain and about crypto, and now AI as well. So he is always been out there looking for what's the next biggest thing and being one of the first people to adopt it. And they share with other people what he's learning through himself and through other experts that he's hosting, which he's also doing in ai. So he has an AI podcast, probably the only podcast other than leveraging AI who is very practical and tactical. So if you want to learn, other than just through my podcast, through other podcasts that provide very tactical knowledge, AI explored, which is Mike's AI podcast, he has a bunch, uh, would be a great way to do that. Now, in addition to make it even more interesting, he, this year is launching another conference. So in parallel to social media marketing world, which again is the largest marketing. social media marketing conference in the world. He's launching the AI World Conference, which is gonna happen at the same time in California in April of 2026. And he has an incredible roster of speakers. As somebody, and you know me, I've been speaking at a lot of conferences and I meet and host a lot of the biggest AI experts in the world. The speaker list that Mike has put together for this conference is second to none. All the, literally the best practitioners out there across different aspects of AI implementation are gonna be at AI world. And so, myself included, but I'm really humbled to be there. The list is, very, very long, like really amazing list of speakers. So if you want to meet in person with people who are like you or business people who want to learn how to implement AI and get to learn from the best practitioners on the planet, I highly. Recommend coming to Mike's conference. But now to today's topic, Mike has been creating content at the highest levels for a very long time. I'm not gonna date him I, but he's been doing this at the highest levels for a very long time, and he was able to grow a very successful business, and again, the largest conference in the world on a topic by creating this content. And he's an amazing educator when it comes to breaking things down into steps and being very practical in his approach. And so it makes him the perfect person to teach you and me how to effectively create content with Claude Projects. And so I'm really on a personal level and on a professional level. Excited and humbled to welcome Mike to the show. Mike, welcome to leveraging Ai

Mike Stelzner:

Isar. Thank you so much. I am Excited to be here with you today, and I'm very excited you're gonna be speaking at AI Business World. That's the key word that was missing AI business world, which is part of social media marketing world. Um, it's gonna be amazing and I can't wait to talk about what we're gonna talk about today.

Isar Meitis:

Same here. I, I, like I said, I think people, you know, you come from a marketing background and a copywriting background, but everything is creating content. when you're writing an email, you're creating content, of course. And so I know what you're gonna teach us today based on what we've, what we talked about in the onboarding call is gonna be extremely valuable to people. But let's really start with. What the hell is Claude Projects? And why is this your weapon of choice when it comes to content creation?

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah. Well, let's back up a little bit and talk about Claude. DRO Amide, who used to work for Open ai, went off and started his own company called Philanthropic. A few years back, and his angle was he wanted to try to do an ethical alternative to ai. Now we can debate whether or not his company has done things ethically or not, because they recently had a lawsuit where a bunch of authors, uh, settled because they, quote, unquote, bought one copy of my book and other people's books, my writing book and train their AI model on it. But I would say that that, uh, anthropic is one of the best, platforms for writing and. The reason why is because they've got some pretty strong investors. They've got Jeff Bezos who happens to own the Washington Post, and you can bet your bottom dollar that this model's been trained on all the journalism that came outta the Washington Post. In addition, Amazon is a major investor, which means you've got all of the Amazon ecosystem and you think about all the stuff. Amazon's a lot more than just a website, and then of course, Google is the other major investor, despite the fact that they have their own model. In Gemini, Google is a major investor. So when you take Google and Amazon and Jeff Bezos and you pit them up against open AI and Microsoft, right, which is the big investor, you can begin to see kind of. Where it's all going now. Claude is widely accepted as best in class for coding. Uh, anybody who's a developer, which I know a lot of your audience probably is not a developer, knows that Claude is the best coder on the planet, okay? There's others that are trying to compete against it. But what a lot of people do not realize is it's also one of the best writers. My first book was called Writing White Papers. I have a huge, community of friends that are, uh, copywriters and former writers, and they've all been up in arms about ai. but they mostly because they thought it was going to take their job, but they realize that tech GPT is good. But it's not great. So a lot of them aren't concerned, but I'm here to tell you. Claude is great. Okay. Claude is exceptionally good with writing, exceptionally good with persuasive writing, and anybody who's listening right now, our job is almost always to persuade someone. And if you can create something that is very persuasive, then you can increase the likelihood that you accomplish whatever you want. and the other thing that's really important is that it's got a very. intuitive experience. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's one of the most friendly, easy to use platforms. Way, way more intuitive, than chat GPT as far as the way it communicates, as far as its visual interface. And the other thing that's really important is it's very prompt compliant. Now, a lot of people that aren't technical might not know what that means, but it's a rule follower, that's the best way to say it. Okay. It's going to follow the rules very precisely, and there is a place for that, and that's really valuable when you wanna do really, really precise stuff now to the projects.

Isar Meitis:

Um, I'll, I'll pause you. I'll pause you just for one second. to add my 2 cents.

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

Uh, first of all, I agree. I think Claude, from a writing perspective, is the best writer. But I think the most exciting thing about what we're gonna cover now is most people are not like you. Most people do not have copywriting background. Most people are not been creating content for years. Most people, and Claude, if you know how to structure it correctly, which is what we were, we're going to teach you in the next 30 minutes, is exceptional at doing exactly that. So once you give it. The frameworks and the process, you can then tell it what you want it to write about and you will do. Uh, from my perspective, it does a significantly better job than I can write myself because I don't have a copywriting, background. And so that's why I think this is so, powerful. It's just that it's beyond the fact that it's easy to use. It just writes better content than probably 99% of the people on the planet.

Mike Stelzner:

Exactly. So now to Claude Projects, uh, a Claude project is similar to a custom GPT or a Google Gem, a Gemini gem. it's not the same as a, uh, chat GPT project, but it's kind of similar to a chat GPT project. But projects started with Claude. And the big advantage to projects, first of all, is that they allow you to create a set of instructions and then to have as many threads inside this. Project as you want. So a lot of people will use projects to delineate different kinds of tasks or pro or client projects or whatever you can imagine. Every project is, contained, meaning it's not going to like bleed out into your general use of clawed. It's not gonna bleed into other projects. the projects also have memory, and memory is really important. Those of you that use chat, GPT, you already understand the power of memory well within a project. As you have like tens and dozens of, and hundreds of interactions with a project, the memory feature begins to, for lack of better words, augment its project instructions by learning what your preferences are. And that is not something you can edit in a traditional sense. You have to prompt edit it. Where with, chat GPT, you can go in and actually edit it, at least it used to be that way. With Claude, you have to reinst instruct it to, to change it, but it is smart and it learns over time. In addition, this part is, what I love about Claude is it acts as an advisor. So it will eventually learn that what you're doing is you're writing something and it will eventually start scoring it or giving you its opinion. So if you ask it to do multiple variations of things, eventually it's gonna tell you, here's my top pick and here's why. And it's not, it's gonna do that without even being prompted. And that's part of the reason why so many writers really, really love. Claude. So some of the projects that I, use on almost a daily basis. The first one is I have an email copywriter for social Media marketing world, and we're gonna spend a lot of time looking at that project because that's a very powerful project. I've also got a YouTube hook specialist and a personal writer. but the one that we're gonna probably spend the most time on is creating a copywriter for your own product. And this is really, I think, the key value proposition. And just so I begin to explain how this works for our company, um, we have emails that are promotional emails that we send out to. Our email newsletter audience or to people who have bought tickets before and are trying to get'em to come back, or to people that belong to our AI Business Society or.dot.you. We've got all these different audiences that we can communicate this product to. In addition, we also have people who have bought a ticket and we want to get them excited about coming to the event. So this copywriter is trained up and intimately understands everything about this product and we can use it to do all sorts of other things, which we're gonna talk about today. but I literally use it almost every single day and it is my absolute favorite thing. So any thoughts on Claude projects in general before we get into actually the copywriter and how to set it up and all that fun stuff? Yeah, my

Isar Meitis:

2 cents and then we'll dive right into sharing exactly how it works in a quick summary to everything that Mike said, which is all a hundred percent accurate, the way it works is you upload. Examples, documents, samples, whatever you want as reference material. You give it instructions, but then different than a custom GPT, you can have a free form conversation with it based on that information. And as Mike said, based on what he learned over time. So after he had this conversation 50 times in the first. 10. It's gonna write exactly like you said the instructions, but if you fix it kind of in the same direction every single time, say, oh, I want it to be more like this, or more like that, it will learn and will adapt slightly based on your ongoing feedback to be exactly what you want, which means you will need less and less corrections over time, which makes it even more powerful than the initial instructions. So with that, let's dive in. See how this looks like, how it works, how you're using it, and get to the meat and potatoes of this episode.

Mike Stelzner:

One important distinction. As I go into screen sharing is this is only available with a paid account. Yes. And this is really important, so trust me, it's worth the 20 bucks or whatever it is. totally worth it. Okay, what we're looking at here on the screen, I'm gonna narrate this for anybody who's listening to the podcast, is what a general project look like, looks like. And you've got all, you've got all your threads here and I've got bazillions of them in here. And, um, it looks a lot like chat, GPT, but it has a memory. And the memory as I can see right here, if I click in on it, has all sorts of interesting information that it's just. Made up on its own, and you can tell it, for example, you're overusing something and it's gonna go ahead and update its memory, you know? So it's very similar to chat GPT in that regard. You can just tell it, Hey, add this to your memory. um, okay, so the key thing to a project is to set up the instructions and the instructions. By the way, this is kind of wonky, but it's recommended that you use a browser, and you make your browser window wide enough, because if your browser window is not wide enough, the instructions are inaccessible, they literally disappear. There's no way to get to'em. The only way to get to'em is to actually have you found this to be true also, ISAR. It's the, it's the biggest, biggest. It's weird

Isar Meitis:

how sometimes they do this in a way that're like, why did you do this like this? Yeah. Its super not

Mike Stelzner:

intuitive. So if you're on a laptop, make the window as big as possible. Okay. So there's a section called instructions. And in here you want to include your instructions. So what I'm going to do is basically tell you the most important part of the instruction is going to be the primary role and responsibility. And you always wanna start with this language. You are a world-class writer specializing in crafting and improving persuasive marketing emails for put your product in there. Okay. It's that simple. and then in my case, I said Social media marketing world 2026 with the, with the month. And I said, note, AI business World is a sub conference of social media marketing world. That was an important distinction I needed to add in there so I could use this project to actually have both of these things on one project. Then your role, this next part's really important. Your role is to help create compelling email content that sells tickets and promotes the conference to the target audience of experienced marketers, particularly focusing on. X, Y, and Z. Okay. So that, that first paragraph should be very simple. The key part of it is you have to say that you're a world class writer specializing in crafting and improving persuasive emails or whatever you want. Okay? So as we go through this, there are other parts of this that I'm going to generically describe. Okay. their label is key instructions and guidelines. And this is kind of important. Um, and this is something I learned after literally using this cloud project now for coming up on two years. first of all, you want to tell it to use artifacts. Let me explain what a artifact is. I'm going to show, I'm gonna show people what a artifact looks like. in one of these tabs here, I've got a artifact up. And what a artifact is effectively, it's kind of like a Microsoft Word document. And what it does is it formats everything beautifully. So you've got like your H one headlines, your H two, your bullets, your bolds, all the stuff is in there. And you can copy that if you want to write into a Google Doc or into a Word doc. But the reason you want it in artifact is because when you're writing, it's just so much easier to read an artifact and to interact with an artifact. And by the way, for what it's worth, when you're in an artifact, you can select, the section of the artifact. And normally you would have a little popup that would appear and it would allow you to edit, um, something inside of the artifact. And obviously I'm not able to do this right now for whatever reason. But, oh, probably because this is just a recommendation artifact, but normally if, if you're work, here we go. If you're working inside of an artifact and you don't like the way something sounds, you're supposed to be able to right, to right click on it. And typically, of course, it's not working right now. But typically what would pop up is it would say improve or modify, and then you just type in what you wanna approve and it would improve. But if you don't even use that, it's fine. It's just use it for a visual interface. Go ahead.

Isar Meitis:

So it's the biggest difference between artifact and just running it in the regular cloud is that it's a side by side like environment, where on the right you have the output, basically what the AI wrote. And on the left you have the regular chat. And as Mike suggested, you can even interact with specific segments, inside of artifacts. Those of you who know Canvas in Chachi pt, it is very similar to Canvas in Chachi PT with two major distinctions. Uh, one. In canvas, you can actually edit manually. You can type things, which you cannot do in artifact, which drives me crazy, I dunno why. Yeah. And two, from a formatting perspective, artifact is a completely different ball game. if you give it your brand guidelines, it will use your colors and your fonts, hundred percent and headers and footers, like all this stuff that is required for it to be almost a final and complete product. So from a formatting perspective, uh, artifact is by far the number one tool right now as far as getting the closest that you can to the final product that you need.

Mike Stelzner:

So what you wanna do is you wanna, that's your first guideline is you want it to be in an artifact because it'll be just much easier for your eyes to read it. I end up copying all this into a Google Doc anyways, when I find what I want. I don't like to use any AI model as, as a storage repository for my final work. I like to just take it into a Google doc and, and work on it that way. So that's the first thing is use artifacts. The second thing is to explain who the target audience is. This is really important, this basic copywriting principle. the more you know about who your target audience is, the more and what their interests are, the more your project is going to be highly customized to you. So in my case, it's um, American female marketers, 30 years of age and older who are interested in ai, Instagram, and Facebook market. And it's a very, very simple. Description of the target audience. You can be a little bit more complex if you want, but you don't have to. Then the next thing you wanna do, so, so far we've key instructions is use artifacts, focus on the target audience. third thing is to emphasize the key benefits. So whatever your products benefits are, you want to identify what those key benefits are. So those could be, and if you don't know what they are, you could use AI to think how to delineate between a feature and a benefit. So for example, a feature would be like. We have a sub conference focused on ai. A benefit would be you can come to this conference and spend two solid days just exclusively learning AI and walk away with security for your job in the future. Do you see the difference? So one is just very focused on what it is. The other one is the outcome, the desired outcome. Typically, that would be achieved, and a lot of people that are not writers have a hard time thinking in benefits. But you can ask Claude to translate something into a benefit. You can just say, here's who our target audience is. Help me take these features and translate them into benefits. Okay. So that's really important for everybody to think about from a writer. Perspective. the next set of instructions is the, is the way I want it to write. So in my case, I said maintain a friendly conversational tone, but, but be concise and impactful. And this is important because I'm sending emails and I don't want it to be so long. People are getting disrupted in their inbox. And then I said, use active language instead of passive language and start bullet points with verbs. So grow your reach, you know, expand your horizon, you know, whatever, you know, instead of non verbs. And then the most important thing of this is I said incorporate testimonials and social proof. But in all caps I said, do not make up testimonials. Okay? Instead pull them from the data set. And we're gonna talk about that in a sec. and then create a sense of urgency where appropriate. Then over time you're going to learn that it makes mistakes. And you're gonna have a section called feedback and corrections where you're gonna tell it what not to do. You might say like, Hey, ease up on emojis. or in my case, I don't have a problem with M dashes, so I don't have that in there. And then this last part is also very important. If you know that there's a couple samples of writing that have been very performative for you, you wanna include those. So for example, if you have a really, if you've sent emails in the past that got a lot of, interaction. Then you're gonna want to include that in there as well. um, so the most important part of this is primary role and responsibility, and then under these key instructions, the most important instruction is gonna be that target audience. And then if you have testimonials, we're gonna talk about that in just a sec, but I'm gonna move on to files and stuff here, unless you have some questions, uh, about the instructions. Yeah. I'll

Isar Meitis:

add one, one small thing and then I have a small follow up question. What I will add is, for those of you who are scared of creating this kind of prompt, the easiest way to do this is to open a regular chat in your, in Claude or in any other platform, say, Hey, this is what I'm trying to do. I want to create instructions for a club project that will achieve this and that goal, in this particular case, writing, convincing and effective content, for newsletters. and I need your help in crafting the instructions. What do I need to think about? Ask me questions about my company, ask me questions about what I do, and. It will then write the instructions for you and it's gonna be a good start, and then you just iterate from there. So, okay, now

Mike Stelzner:

this is fascinating. Isar. I pitted two projects head to head. One was written by me, the other one was written by Claude. After looking at my interactions, the one that was written by me outperformed literally eight outta 10 times the other one, and by the way, this is worth experimenting with folks. You can create as many cloud projects as you want. I had the exact same data set, the exact same instruction. The only difference was the instructions were one of'em was created by ai, the other one was created by me. Now I think it's because I have a background as a copywriter, I was able to outperform it, but. This is my cautionary tale to those of you that are listening. If you let AI do this for you, you might not get as good of a response as what I've just shared with you. So maybe instead, use AI to help you identify the categories that I came up with instead of letting AI do it for you. Because AI is probably not gonna be as good as someone who has a background as a professional copywriter just coming up with a system instruction. And by the way, I, I always like to tell everybody this when I'm interviewing people on my podcast. The best use of AI is to actually make you a better version of yourself. And I think you believe this to be true, right? So like, if you have extreme domain expertise like I do, um, I, I, I just, I love split testing everything. So try creating multiple projects, put AI up against you following the mike method and see which one wins. You'll be surprised. So, um, I, I'm,

Isar Meitis:

I'm with you a hundred percent. Yeah. Uh. I just think exactly as you said, you are an expert on this topic and not necessarily everybody is. Yeah. Yeah. But if everybody follows

Mike Stelzner:

what I said, they're gonna be golden. Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

Uh, my, my next question really goes to the files and I see you have a lot of them. Yeah. Now that you've developed multiple of those, do you have a feel of how many and what kind of files you need to have for this to be as efficient? And can you overdo it? did you get to the point of like, okay, I've uploaded 50 files and now it's not working very well. Well, lemme explain

Mike Stelzner:

what I have here.

Isar Meitis:

Okay.

Mike Stelzner:

Excuse me. And why I have them, because it's very important. um, the reason I have what looks like 10 or 15 files here is because I have taken the sales page for social media marketing world, and I've made PDFs of every page. Mm-hmm. So each of our ticketing types has a page. our agenda has a page. Our speakers have a page, our hotel, I mean, commonly asked questions. So if you have a sales page that is one page sales page, you don't need all these pages. So every one of these pages serves a different purpose. I've also got the pages for AI business world in here. but the key file that I have here is something called SM is my testimonial CSV file. This is the magic sauce, like the second magic sauce. if you happen to have a product where you have lots of customer testimonials, which I have over a thousand of them because we've been doing social media marketing world since 2000, 13, 13, 14, 13, something like that. We've been doing it for a while. Yeah, since 2013. You can export a CSB file. Like we have these in a sheet, okay? And in the sheet we've got like name and then testimonial. And we even had a column that said topics, but we didn't need the topics'cause AI is really smart. So all I did was export the quote, the na and the first name and the last name of the testimonial person. This is where it gets really fricking cool. AI is so smart that it will be able to look through all of those testimonials and find the best portions of the best testimonials to integrate directly into the emails, which is 100% magic sauce. Because you know, when you get testimonials, typically they're rambling. They might be two paragraphs long and there might be just like one section and that really matters. Well, AI knows how to pull that. Right section, if you will, and knows how to integrate it in the right place inside your messages was, which is absolute gold because the concept there is social proof and there's nothing better to sell than social proof. The other thing that I've trained my AI model to do is also to recommend an image to place inside the email. We have thousands and thousands of images that I'm not uploading into the database, but instead I'm asking the model to recommend what kind of image would make the most amount of sense. Like it'll say people smiling, taking notes, people talking to a speaker in the hallway, that kind of stuff. And then I just go through and I'm manually pick the one that I think is best for the email. which I think is kind of cool. um, yeah, that's the only reason I have lots of PDFs here. And question

Isar Meitis:

about the PDFs. You said most of them are basically, PDF versions of webpages. Yes. Did you try just giving the instructions, the links to the relevant webpages instead of uploading all these files? Or you just, you can't do that.

Mike Stelzner:

Files. but the reason I can't do it is because my website, Claude cannot, I use Super bot Protector, uh, which is, CloudFlare and for whatever reason, Claude can't get past it. Does that make sense?

Isar Meitis:

Got it. So it allow, it does not allow the, the AI to crawl your website, so you have to convert it two pages.

Mike Stelzner:

That's right. Exactly.

Isar Meitis:

Got it. Makes sense.

Mike Stelzner:

And, but it does mean that every once in a while I've gotta remember to up update the files. And that's something I, you know, like every year I've got new speakers, right. So I have to up update a new pdf, DF yeah.

Isar Meitis:

That kind of stuff. Yeah. And new testimonials and all. And now you'll have testimonials about ai. So yeah, all these things have to, and there's probably

Mike Stelzner:

better ways to do this, but this is just the way that I do it because this is the way I know how to do it.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah, no, I, I, I will add one more thing that I do on a slightly different note, but it's still connected to the topic of projects. I, I have a project that writes on my proposal. Just as an example of what I have in there is I have a template of a proposal, like what are the different components I include in the proposal, so it knows how to pull from that. And just like Mike said, it doesn't pull everything, it just pulls what's relevant to this particular, client based on the transcript of a call I have with them. So it's just, it is really good at pulling information from the different files and combining it into the output that you want to combine it. And as Mike said earlier, uh, another big one is good examples. Like if you have great performing emails, newsletter reports, proposals, whatever it is that you've done in the past that you're using this for, you can upload one or two examples and say, these performed really, really well. Uh, use these as. Hints to what is good and then you can do that as well as far as the files that you upload.

Mike Stelzner:

Now this is really important because Claude is very prompt, compliant. It might keep modeling those examples over and over again, and at a certain point you have to tell it, stop modeling it so closely, get creative. Like I have this, there's two types of marketers and it, Claude just loves to use that a million times. And I finally had to say, ease up on it. You know? Yeah. There's a better way they can say it without like saying it so directly.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah.

Mike Stelzner:

So if you want, I can show you how I now use this project to accomplish.

Isar Meitis:

yeah, yeah. I think that will be extremely.

Mike Stelzner:

So I have my director of marketing, who also has, a Claude project. And his project is, an ideation project where he sends me themes that I can, um, use to write emails. And basically what he includes is the core audience. So, for example, this particular one I'm showing is people that subscribe to our newsletter. the focus, which in this case was invest in yourself and grow your business for next year. The theme. and then emotional triggers. Um, and emotional triggers are just things that, you know, go from overwhelm and control and gain clarity, key message, and it will declare some key messages. And then, usually this is a, this could be a small or a big section, but in the key message you can include important sales that are ending, like we have a 700 off kind of thing. So what I'll do is I will start my prompt with, create multiple email variations based on the below theme. This is the important part. Ask it to create multiple variations. If you do not do that, it will not do that. Okay? And what it will do is it'll reiterate what it's going to do, and then it'll start processing and thinking. And you can set it up if you want to, to notify you when it's done. But typically what it will do is it will start going through its database. It will start reading the customer testimonials. And then what it will do is it will actually output a bunch of different variations. And I'm not gonna go through all these variations, but I'm showing eight different variations. Sometimes it does six times, sometimes it does eight. Now what I'll do, depending on how much time I have, is I'll read all these variations and I'll get a sense as to which one I like best. Then I'll ask it, which is best, and this is where it gets really interesting. It's gonna say variation three. Is the one that I think is the best. And it's gonna tell you exactly why, because it's, you know, it's gonna make the case for you as to why it's best. Okay. And then, I noticed this quote in here was from this guy Anthony Ambre. So I asked it to show me the entire quote because I just wanted to see the context of the entire quote. And sure enough, it pulled up the quote right out of the database. and then I said, all right, let's come up with some alternative subject lines and avoid the word investment because I knew the word investment was gonna send it to a promo tab. So it came up with a whole bunch of different investments. And look at this, it says it's best recommendations are this. So you can see how this is a really consultative, Advisor, if you will. Any thoughts? Any, any feedback on any of this so far? I got three other examples we can talk about. Yeah. I,

Isar Meitis:

I love this. I, I think the two things that you said that are very critical, one is asking for multiple options. And I always do that. What happens to me in many cases is I mix and match between them. I like the first part of the first one and the second part of the second one. And then I add like, well, you can tell it to

Mike Stelzner:

combine them together if you want. Yeah, that's, and that's

Isar Meitis:

exactly what I'm doing. And then I add my own 2 cents. So I would like you to do this and that and add this, and then it creates a new version. And it's like you're saying, in addition to being a consultant, it's a great brainstorming partner. It helps me come up with juicier ideas and together with ai, we get to the final, uh, the final conclusion. Conclusion of this. My, my question to you is how do you eventually decide? It's, it's the final version. It just what feels right to you? It is,

Mike Stelzner:

yeah. what I. Because I'm a crafts person, I kind of know good when I see it. but I also think that most people just take the first iteration out of AI and they say it's way better than I could ever do. I think by asking for multiple variations, what you wanna do is you want to, you want to ask yourself, which one connects to me emotionally? am I getting the feels? You know, am I, is there something about that that makes me want to keep reading? Does it come off as kind of spammy and not me? Or does it come off as like, oh yeah, this is actually something I feel like I could say. You know what I mean? And if it does, that's a good sign that you're off to, to, to the right races. But you know the subject line you might not like. And that's where you can ask it to come up with variations of subject lines. You might not like the quotes that it came up with. So you can go and look at all the other quotes that pulled for all the other emails, but just be careful because sometimes it. Assembles the whole message around the quote. Yeah. Which is really kind of cool. Yeah. Um, you'll also notice that it recommends, an image of people networking at the conference. So that's important. Um, and you can train it eventually to how to, how to format the name and how to format your signature and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's gotten to the point now Esau, where I can literally in 15 to 30 minutes, go from this prompt to the final output. And in the past. I probably could have written a message in the same amount of time, but it wouldn't have been at this quality. Yeah. I would forget to include a testimonial or I wouldn't have the patience to go find the right testimonial. Yeah. Or I wouldn't, I would forget to include an image or I wouldn't even know what kind of theme thematical direction I should go into. So, um, I find that this is, not necessarily saving me time, but it is radically increasing the quality of my output, which is what we want when we're trying to create this ways of messaging.

Isar Meitis:

I'll say one more thing and then let's jump into another example. you, you talked about the fact it's really, in this particular case, a two step process. The first is a different project that generates the theme and the audience and the definition and the goal and so on. Yes. And then this part of the process in, there's two important aspects about this aspect. Number one is this is what you want to do. You don't want to combine unrelated. Automations into one process because it just confuses the AI and it dilutes the quality. So you want to do two, three steps, do them separately, and then copy and paste the output from one to the other. And the second thing that I will say, if you really want to do this, you can then go to a third party tool, like make.com or NA 10 or whatever to string these steps together, assuming there's no human input in the process. Meaning if it's literally just copying and pasting from one to the other, you can use a third party tool to move the data from one to the other, and you just look at the final version or look at all the different components and the end of the process versus having to copy and paste. But definitely the important part is break this down into several different steps. Each one is focused on providing a specific kind of value.

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah, exactly right. So here's another example. This one was for a different audience. This was for people that had previously attended. And this was all about triggering nostalgia and belonging and memories of the good things that have happened. And, but also dealing with some of the challenges that my audience faces.'cause they often work alone and they don't, they're not around people that understand them. So, um, in this particular case, we can see that it came up with a. A ton of variations, just like the other one. And it went through its whole process. And then I asked it just like I did before, which one is the best? And it came up with, one of the variations that it thought was the best. And of course you can see this type one, type two thing I was talking to you about before. It does it a lot because unfortunately it's, it's what it's got. Then I, I did what you suggested is I said, can you combine number two with number one? Because I actually really like number one, it was like, you already know what it feels like, you know, that feeling, walking into it, blah, blah, blah. It just felt a little bit more like nostalgic than number two. And, um, what it ended up doing was it ended up making this hybrid version of it, which is what you were talking about. And, um, it took the best of both of them and it effectively combined it together. and then just like before I said, can you come up with better subject lines? And in this particular case it just said, here's my number one recommendation and here's my number two, and here's my number three. So again, this project is exactly the same thing. It's just a different audience. Yeah. Right. And this is really important'cause a lot of marketers will just take the same message and they'll slightly modify the message to the different audiences. I'm a proponent that if you have the power of AI behind you, why not come up with a completely different message for each of the audiences that is 100% customized to them, that's going to yield in something really, really powerful. Now there's two more applications I'm going to be talking about. One of them is actually using a writer project to do a non-writing related task, which is to create a script for a podcast ad. And the other one is actually to use it to do something completely out of the box. now do you want me to go to that right away or do you have any questions at this point, Sean? No.

Isar Meitis:

Let's, let's go. I think it's exciting.

Mike Stelzner:

Alright, so this is fun. so this model understands my conference like no other model. So here's what I said. I said you are now also an export at creating spoken word ads. This is important. I gave it a new role. Okay. Then I went on still,

Isar Meitis:

still within the same project. Again, I project for people. Project. You're not creating a new project, you're. Using the fact that this project knows so much about the conference and what you do in it,

Mike Stelzner:

it would be a nightmare for me to create a new project considering how complex this project is. So this is the secret sauce. You can take any project that, is designed to do a very specific task and you can have it do a tangential task for you as long as you give it a new role. Okay, so I gave it a new role. you're expert at. You're now also expert at creating spoken word ads. Create a 32nd pre-roll podcast ad based on this content. So this is important. What I did was I took an email that my director of marketing said, use this as inspiration. That was created by Claude in the first place and create a, a podcast ad out of it. Okay, so you're seeing I'm just repurposing something here. And it said, okay, here it is. You know, and it, it basically just created a very simple ad. It knew I was gonna be speaking it, so it made almost every paragraph one line. So it was easy for me to speak. And, um, it, even without me asking, suggested when I can talk a little bit faster and when I can talk a little bit slower, isn't that cool's incredible? I didn't ask it to do. That's, and it came up with some alternative openings, you know, for me. And then I said, oh, I forgot to add in this information. So it went ahead and it created a new version of the, of the ad. And this time it put it in a it, this time it put it in a, in a, um, uh, what do you call this thing? A artifact, right? And it included this important piece of data that I had forgotten, which is that we have a sail ending. But it wrote it in a way that. Works for me when I verbally speak it. and then I also, there was a quote in here and I asked it, to source the quote, and I ended, I, I worked back and forth with it, and then I ended up, having it create a Midroll ad next. And then finally, you know, I, I just, I just kept working with this until I got what I wanted. And then, you know, it ended up creating, a final, final ad with it. I had to end up putting a different quote in front, in front of it. I had to put the name of the person before I actually said the quote instead of after I put the quote. Because when you're speaking a quote, It's kind of like weird if you just start quote unquote acting like you're someone different, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but anyways, this allowed me to very rapidly take an email and out and, and, and output a really nice looking final podcast episode, ad that I recorded and it told me. Told me how long it would take. It told me when I should, focus certain kinds of things. It was pretty cool. Yeah. Any, any feedback on that or any thoughts on that?

Isar Meitis:

Yeah. First of all, I think it's brilliant. I think the key take here for people is that you can quote, unquote, repurpose your existing project. The project knows a lot about a topic. That's the whole point of it, right? And then if you ask it to do something else, it will leverage all the knowledge that it has, the instructions, the reference material, the memory, all the stuff that we talked about. It's gonna use that to do the new task and the new role that you gave it, which is. Magical because it, it has, again, Mike said it has two years of experience of working with Mike, right? As a brainstorming partner, as a consultant, as a copywriter. All of that combined into one project. And now you can use that project to do other things. Again, generalize this to anything that you're doing, whether you're writing reports, whether you're writing sales emails, whether you are, creating training materials for companies, like whatever it is that you're doing that is quote unquote your content. You can use a project that knows a lot about that particular topic to do anything because it knows a lot about the topic and how you like to do it, which is another big part, uh, of this. So I, I think this is a, a brilliant example.

Mike Stelzner:

Okay, this last one is really creative and out of the box. this time I asked it, I said, you're an expert at helping put together podcast episodes that are designed to create high quality content, yet also promote social media marketing world. I will provide context as to who is speaking on what topics. And we'll ask you to assist me to analyze the best guests for certain themes. Do you understand? Okay. It was very simple. It said, yep, I'm adding a new role, podcast episode strategy. And just so you understand, what I was trying to do here was I decided that I'm going to have four round table podcast episodes that are gonna be regular episodes of my social media marketing podcast, but I'm going to bring on guests, to other people around certain kinds of themes. So what I did was I pasted in the most up-to-date list of all the speakers across, there's like 50 of'em, okay? And I said, study this list and I will ask questions. And it said, okay, here's what I see. You've got all these people in all these different categories. and I said, okay, if I did an episode called What's Working with Instagram Marketing right now, select two other guests to join Michael Stelzner. That will create an interesting show. And here's what it did. It went and it looked at all,'cause it already has. You know, it already knows who all these speakers are. It must have from its LLM kind of understood some of this stuff. And it said, here's the two guests that I would recommend and here's why this works. It's diverse perspectives, blah, blah, blah. Different teaching styles, different gender balances. And then it said, would you like me to suggest different angles for themes of the podcast? And I said, sure. And it went ahead and it came up with like a, I mean, look at this. It came up, it's pretty fricking crazy. It came up with a headline and opening hook segments, all sorts of stuff because I just asked it to take on this new role and this is where it gets really interesting. I also went on to ask it to, alright, let's come up with one on what's working with content marketing right now. And it picked two people, Andy Crest and Brian Piper, who are big names in the content marketing world. And then I said, okay, how about what's working with short form video? Said Pat Flynn and Ed and Hasan, pat Flynn's got this massive. Pokemon channel. and then I said, okay, what's working? And by the way, it also said why it didn't choose other people that are speaking on the same topic, which is really intriguing. And then I said, okay, Facebook ads. I just went through a bazillion of these things, okay. And then I said, Hey, you have Ed and Hasan twice. Can we swap'em out with someone else? So it came up with somebody else. And then as we keep going through here, this is where it gets really interesting. I eventually got to the point where I said, okay, here's the ones that I like the most. If I could only choose four, which would you choose? Okay. And then it came up with its top priority of them. So for example, number one, pri Oh, you know what, actually, I have to back this up a little bit. I did ask it what? Um, I, somewhere in here I asked it, what's something I'm not covering? It said, well, here's some topics you probably should consider. So in the end, you can see I'm using this as a consultant. And basically, this was a really out of the box. Oh, here we go. What are other topical themes I should consider that might be just as powerful as the first one? So it had said, the one that it thought was the best was about the threat of marketing. And it came up with these, what are called maximum urgency themes, like the AI replacement reality, which marketing jobs will disappear first. Here's some guess. So this was a very powerful, and this is really, this is the essence of what I wanna share. this is the complete out of the box way of using a project that I'd already created, but I'm telling you right now was brilliant and this, this was so good that I actually ended up using this to not just pick the topics, but eventually to create the questions that were gonna be, the questions I was gonna ask during the interview. Crazy, huh?

Isar Meitis:

Absolutely incredible. really, really incredible. And, and I wanna, I wanna add one last thing to, to what you said is going, connecting full circle to what you said in the beginning. Yeah. You have a full-time 24 7 incredible consultant, brainstorm, partner and copywriter for 20 bucks a month, which is what you said in the beginning, like, who understands my product better than I do even Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like if you, and again, to connect this back to, to, to business, right? At the end of the day, yes, Mike is investing a lot of effort of his time to work with the ai, to train it, to work with it, to interact with it, to put his soul and knowledge and experience into this. But if you, because of these more nuanced emails, newsletter, podcast episodes, guests, examples, questions that he's asking can increase the amount of people who come to the conference by 10%. That is a lot of money. So the business benefits from it just by having this free consultants and by this just better finessed. And I think what you said is very, very interesting because most people go to how is this gonna save me time? And you said, it doesn't necessarily save me time, it just makes it better and better drives more business and more business means more money. And this is why we're doing this. And so I think this is a, first of all, incredible episode. I really appreciate you sharing, uh, all your secret sauce. Can I say

Mike Stelzner:

something else just to Yeah, a hundred percent what you said. let's not discount the leverage that this brings because it enables you to be creative. Yeah. In a way, maybe you're tired'cause you've got a lot going on and it would be a lot of work for me to do. What I just showed you with analyzing all these different people, trying to make the best selections, discounting my biases about who's a friend and who's not a friend, and all that kind of stuff. this is objective. This understands who these people are. Even though I haven't given it a lot of information because it's in its large language model. It's looking at it through the lens of the ideal customer, which is what I often forget about, and it just gives me incredible leverage to now say, huh, I've got this project that's really, really good at this thing. What if I just gave it a slightly different assignment and could I use it for this thing over here? And I'm telling you that that is a massive unlock because a lot of people don't. Allow themselves to get creative and expand their horizons on things.'cause they just don't have the mental energy to do it. AI will never get tired. It might freeze up on you. It might tell you you're, you gotta wait until one o'clock in the afternoon before you can reuse it'cause you're using it too much. But I feel like that's a massive unlock for a lot of us is the ability to actually go further. and it also, another big unlock for me is I used to be only be able to do this work in the morning when I'm most creative. Now I find even when I'm exhausted, I can do this work with Claude because it's because it reenergizes me. I don't know, I just, I think there's something really powerful here that, is more about creative output and less about necessarily just the time saving. So I just wanted to double down on that.

Isar Meitis:

I, again, exceptional. Really, really great. I really, really appreciate you sharing. If people want to find you, work with you, learn about what you do, join the conference, follow the podcast, what are the best ways to do that?

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah, well first of all, we've got a a hundred dollars off coupon off the already discounted price. that's gonna expire on January 1st, 2026. Social media examiner.com/leveraging ai. Okay.

Isar Meitis:

That's gonna be easy for people to remember.

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah. Leveraging ai, that word leverage is there again. and it'll show up and I'll drop,

Isar Meitis:

I will drop a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. So you guys can be lazy and just click on the link.

Mike Stelzner:

Yeah. And you know. It's across all the different ticketing types if you, virtual, physical or whatever. I am most active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. So you can follow me on any of those channels. And then if you just wanna listen to another podcast, AI explored is the one that, uh, Essar was mentioning earlier in the show. other than that, thank you so much for having me.

Isar Meitis:

No, this was absolutely awesome. Again, it's been a real pleasure. You went above and beyond in really sharing, you know, the details of your real day-to-day work. Like most people give you frameworks and don't show the like, this is really my secret sauce and you did. So I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Mike Stelzner:

My pleasure.

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Isar Meitis

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